It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.
This time, we review 4×4 Jam, A Doodle Fly, Business Card Reader, Gorillacam, Magnetic Joe, Magnetic Joe 2, Neocell Fighters Evolution, Noise.io LE, Rasta Monkey, Samurai: Way of the Warrior, and Ultimate Video Poker.
The National Trust is one of the UK’s national treasures – a charity that looks after all manner of old and ancient pieces of British heritage.
That means owning and maintaining miles of coastline, acres of woodlands, heaths, mountains and gardens, and quite a few stately homes.
The Trust is much loved, but it has something of a stuffy reputation. The stately homes are usually preserved as they would have been in times past – which means you’re allowed to walk through and take pictures, but not touch.
Not anymore. A new policy of opening up means the Trust is allowing people to touch historic objects for the first time.
It’s also a good time to launch a National Trust iPhone app. The free app includes locations, maps, opening times and visitor information for all National Trust properties in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
I particularly like the “Near to me” feature. Obvious to include, of course, but might come in really useful next time I’m exploring an unfamiliar part of the country with the family in tow.
Apple has devs to the grindstone for a new social networking app called iGroups.
Patently Apple reports that docs out today from the US Patent Office describe a new service that would work on your iPhone and probably MobileMe, too.
Let’s say you’re attending SXSW: iGroups would keep you in touch with your co-workers and friends by allowing you to share your location plus info and comment on events as they happen, greatly facilitating which parties or events are worth attending or already over.
To accomplish this, iGroups reportedly employs a sophisticated cryptographic key generation system to ensure security and privacy.
The patent also states that if one of group devices lacks true positioning technology, Apple’s MobileMe service would provide “virtual GPS” capability to that user so they can still know the whereabouts of other group members.
Would you welcome a geo-location social networking app from Apple, or prefer to stick to Gowalla or Foursquare?
Or do you plan to shun the “Where’s Waldo?” world altogether?
Last year I signed up for a landline phone for my office. I wish I hadn’t for two reasons:
1. No one calls me.
2. Toktumi’s Line2 iPhone app, which adds a second, distinct number to my iPhone.
With a service like Line2, there’s no need for a physical phone at my place of work. I give my Line2 number to all my contacts, and it’s just like having a phone at work — except this office phone is always with me.
Like most people, I don’t like giving out my iPhone number for work but I do it all the time. But when the Line2 number rings, I know it’s a business call. I can route it straight to voicemail, or use the sophisticated Auto Attendtant to make my little company look big and important. “Dial one for the news desk,” it says, “or dial two for advertising and sales.” There’s no telling that both departments are one and the same: me.
Last week we reported on a director who shot a music video using only three iPhones. Now, Tom Freeman brings an all-iPhone production to the arena of sound with the release of his electronic soundscape, iMatik.
Londoners stuck in the tube now have a handy iPhone app to request ticket refunds.
Tube Refund, which costs $0.99, zaps off the request for riders whose journey is delayed over 15 minutes.
Depending on where you go and what time of day, a one-way tube ticket can cost from £1.80 to £4.00 ($2.75 – $6 circa) and a weekly pass £44 ($67) so the app could quickly pay for itself.
This is a great idea — though according to the London Underground rules, refunds only apply for delays “within our control” that last over 15 minutes.
Given that it’s the oldest underground railway in the world, it’s hard to know how much time riders spend in darkened tunnels is due to reasons beyond control of transport authorities.
Via London Evening Standard, thanks hackneye.
Ever been attacked by a voyeuristic hankering to see what images are being tweeted right now while, say, waiting for a table at the local steakhouse? Well, whip out the iPhone, because Swiss developer Nicolas Seriot has the scratch for your itch.
TweetyShow does for tweeted photos what Chirp Flow did for text tweets: displays a stream of images being tweeted — in this instance, to Twitpic — in realtime. There are sites on the web like PingWire that do the same thing, but Seriot says this is a first on the iPhone.
The app sells for a buck, and also has the ability to search for photos tweeted by a specific user.
You know spring has arrived when apps like this start making appearances: New from App Cubby is KaleidoVid, a dollar-app that turns the iPhone into a kaleidoscope.
Just point the camera at something colorful and KaleidoVid does the rest; the app then lets you unleash your creation on the world through email, Facebook or Twitter.
Seems like a great candidate for the Best Magic Brownie App Award.
Apple seems to be changing its tune on VoIP apps for the iPod touch. Less than a week after it was submitted, Toktumi’s Line2 VoIP app has been approved by Apple. The $14.95 a month app turns the iPod touch into a fully-featured telephone.
“Interesting was how quickly it was approved – less than a week from submission!” says Toktumi’s founder and CEO, Peter Sisson. “I think its an important development.”
Already available for the iPhone, Toktumi‘s Line2 app joins Skype and Truphone For iPod on the touch, but boasts more features, Sisson says. As well as unlimited U.S. and Canada calling and low international rates, the app has a host of “professional-grade” features, such as call waiting, conferencing, call transfer and visual voicemail.
“It turns the iPod touch into a serious telephone,”Sisson says. “It’s a real telephone. You use it over Wi-Fi and you’re spending $15 a month and that’s it.”
In January, Apple approved an update of the Line2 app on the iPhone to make and receive phone calls over a 3G or WiFi. The approval was in stark contrast to Apple’s earlier stance on VoIP apps, which seemed hostile. Apple’s position was highlighted by the spat over Google Voice, which Apple still hasn’t approved for the App Store.
On the iPhone, the Line2 iPhone app provides with an additional number. It’s pitched at business users as a way of separating business and personal calls.
It also provides a host of advanced, business-oriented call control features like caller-specific call forwarding, after-hours settings, voicemail by email and an auto-attendant (“Press 1 for…”). And it can be used to avoid roaming charges when travelling overseas.
Avaliable as a free 30-day trial, Line2 is $14.95 a month, pay-as-you-go. Here’s the iTunes Link.
Hit the jump for a couple of videos showing how it works.
A new app called Silent Bodyguard features a panic button that sends an SOS distress signal with GPS coordinates to potential rescuers without alerting onlookers.
While the $3.99 app, available on iTunes, isn’t the first ICE (in case of emergency) app, this one is backed by Dr. Clint Van Zandt, former FBI chief hostage negotiator and criminal profiler.
Van Zandt says the app may prove useful in situations where a person is trapped or in grave danger but can’t place a call or create a text message. In Silent Bodyguard, users program in contacts for SMS alerts, calls or email addresses to reach in case of emergency.
Silent bodyguard is the brainchild of Los Angeles mom Jo Perry whose daughters came a little too close to becoming crime statistics for comfort. Her youngest daughter was the classmate of a girl abducted and killed while on an errand and her oldest daughter attends the same University as the graduate student recently murdered in a lab.
Perry, who co-developed the app with Justin Leader, points out that once activated, the SOS messages will continue to be sent out every 60 seconds, updating location. Even if it goes out once, four emergency contacts will know that the user is in some kind of trouble. The alarms keep going out until turned off.
The idea is that you can communicate distress when you can’t make a call or a text. Perry keeps hers in a pocket, not her purse, just in case.
“The app is simple, but because we designed it to be silent and for “stealth” activation, it’s not the usual on-off button people are used to, ” Perry told CoM in an email. “That’s why people don’t always “get it” at first. The home screen is designed to look like a photo viewer, not an alarm. Again, to make it easy to use when a person feels threatened in the presence of people who might be hostile. Joggers, college students, realtors, etc. can find themselves in scary situations with people around whom they can’t just dial a friend and say, “I’m scared.”
We do like the idea, but wonder what you’re supposed to do when the first thing the perp grabs is your iPhone…
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suCe4-SWsHo&feature=player_embedded
There’s more than one company to experiment with iPhone payment schemes lately, and while the likes of Square looks pretty good, I think there’s something beautifully simple about the way PayPal’s iPhone app handles transactions: you just open the app, type in the amount of money and bump your iPhone against the iPhone of the person you want to pay. There’s no dongle required.
It’s about as simple a solution to paying someone using my iPhone as I can think of. The only problem is that it requires you to entrust your financial dealings to the consistently crummy PayPal service. Although I must admit, the embedded video is so endearingly corny, I’m having a hard time hating PayPal too much this morning.
[via 9to5Mac]
About a hundred years ago, while I was still a Windows user and thought that a Mac was what you covered in a cheese and slurped down for lunch, I whiled away way too much time playing a DOS-based artillery duel game called Scorched Earth. Dot Matrix Interactive Designs have created their own version in the extremely polished, multiplayer KIL.A.TON — and it’s even more of a blast to play.
It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.
This time, we review Air Assault, Bad Apples, Fire Drop Free, Ghost Capture – Free, Heli Rescue, Internet Radio Box, Sunday Lawn, synthPond Lite, Tiki Totems, and Titanic Rescue.
Birdfeed has long been one of the best Twitter clients available on the App Store, but it was expensive for a Twitter app ($5), which limited the number of people using it. So while existing customers might be sad at first to note that Birdfeed has been pulled from the App Store, it’s actually good news all arond: the app was actually just aquired by Thing Labs and rebranded as the excellent and totally free Brizzly for iPhone app.
Brizzly is a neat little web service that integrates Facebook and Twitter into one interface. Using Brizzly on your iPhone will require you to sign up for the free Brizzly service, but like the recent release of the Meebo app, once you sign up you never need to worry about it again.
Otherwise, Brizzly builds upon Birdfeed’s foundation, keeping some of the best features of that client including the helpful character countdown widget and a simple and intuitive user interface, while introducing new features of its own like lists, a pull-down refresh feature borrowed from Tweetie 2, and the Brizzly Guide which allows you to edit and add explanations to Twitter trends. The other usual features are all there too: support for multiple Twitter accounts, photo support, saved searches, custom tabs and so on.
If you’re looking for a good free Twitter app, Brizzly looks like a very safe bet. You can download it now over at the iTunes App Store.
Drums are awesome; there’re few things as satisfying as making sounds by thumping something with a stick — even if that stick is virtual. Now, for a buck, the iPhone can be turned into a virtual museum of virtual drums, thanks to Vintage Drum by developer OutOfTheBit.
Forget Plants vs. Zombies… how about Tweets vs. Zombies?
Tweet Defense is a cute little tower defense game for the iPhone and iPod Touch that boosts your units power based on your Twitter activity, including status updates and number of followers, as you fight off wave after wave of the undead. A Twitter account is not strictly obligatory, but if you have one, your Twitter statistics will boost your units in various ways: for example, rate of fire, range and damage increases.
According to Tweet Defense’s executive producer, Nelson Rodriguez: “We wondered what it would be like to take your social network and your activities there and turn it into a game. We ended up with a full on tower defense game that uses your friend list and your tweeting activity to impact how powerful your towers are.”
It certainly looks like fun, and at $0.99 on the iTunes App Store, Tweet Defense is easily within the impulse buy category. Now if only I had more Twitter followers to boost my range.
This is kind of a no-brainer once you actually think about it, but according to Mobclix, a mobile device advertising agency, the number of eBooks available on the App Store has surpassed the number of games for the first time ever, with 27,000 eBook apps to 25,400 games.
The reason here is pretty simple: there’s little barrier to entry in releasing an eBook app. All you do is grab a public domain title, wrap it in a remedial interface, slap a $0.99 price on it and hope for the best. Once you’ve programmed the wrapper, you can pump out eBook titles like this quickly and indefinitely, making it an easy moneymaker for more unscrupulous App Devs. Games, on the other hand, require you to have more advanced programming, artistic and design ideas.
For me, the most interesting aspect to this data is what it means for the iPad. Apple wants you to do all of your eBook reading in the iBooks app, but companies like Penguin are already talking about doing a lot of their more interesting work in app form. The eBook glut on the App Store can’t be something Apple wants to encourage to continue when the iPad comes around, but major publishers are doing the same thing.
My guess is we’ll start seeing a purge of crap eBook apps shortly after the iPad’s release. I’m okay with that… as long as they don’t touch my beloved Stanza.
Hadouken! I hope you’ve been practicing your hurricane kicks and lightning cannonballs, because Capcom’s much anticipated port of its beloved Street Fighter IV fighter is now available for $9.99 over on the App Store.
No app’s banning from the App Store has caused more gnashing of teeth and anger than the loss of Google Voice (no, not even the removal of the weak girly picture apps). While it’s understandable why AT&T would want to keep free phone calling and SMS off of their network, it’s still infuriating. As a GrandCentral user from way back in the day (before Google bought it), it annoys me that I can’t have a native interface to my account.
That said, suppliers of Voice are fighting back. Google has made a very nice web app available through Safari, and now Riverturn, makers of the popular VoiceCentral app for iPhone before its removal, has written a web app nearly as good as the native version. Called “Black Swan,” the web app won’t work at all in Safari. Instead, you save a bookmark that populates itself with your Google Voice data and then configures itself perfectly. It’s available in an ad-supported free version or for $6 to get a premium version including photo importing, better customer service and a Do Not Disturb feature.
I’ve been using it all day, and it’s pretty slick. The one flaw I see so far is that it won’t sync my contacts from my phone for regular use, which limits its usefulness as my primary dialer. Still, it’s by far the best way to access Google Voice without jailbreaking. Check it out!
Awesome Note is a charming, flexible, free-form app that combines elements of both note-taking and todo apps. But like uncle Chuck at an all-you-can-eat Vegas-style buffet, trying to shoehorn too much good stuff into one thing can sometimes lead to messy results.
Like LogMeIn Ignition, TeamViewer lets you access a computer over the Internet from your iPhone. The big difference: TeamViewer is completely free.
It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.
This time, we review Angry Birds, Bloom, FallDown!, Icy Escort, RandomPlay, Sir Revs-a-Lot, SteamPunk Hockey, Vector Runner
The Italian priest who launched prayer app iBreviary has now slashed the price from $0.99 to gratis.
Given the popularity of the app, Don Paolo Padrini decided to give the current version away for free. (Profits from the app previously went to refurbishing a parish shelter.)
Available in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin and an Ambrosian Rite version (for mobile Milanese), this virtual breviary, or book of hours, gives the morning prayer, evening prayer and night prayer or complines for the day. It is the first app of its kind to obtain approval from the Vatican.
As a paid app, it was in the top 100 of its category (reference) beating out similar mobile prayer helpers like iPieta and iMissal.
What’s next? Don Padrini tells us his developers are hard at work on an iPad version they hope will be ready to launch when the new device hits stores in March.
Ahh, bless ’em. The hacks at The Sun aren’t famous for hard-hitting investigative journalism, but at least you’d expect them to know an iPhone app when they see one.
A couple of weeks ago a builder fooled them (and the Daily Mail) into believing that he’d taken a photo of a ghostly boy on a building site in Hull.
But as the internet pointed out shortly afterwards, anyone can make the exact same ghostly figure appear pretty much anywhere they like, thanks to the Ghost Capture app for iPhone.
Even funnier are some of the comments posted under the stories. On the Daily Mail’s version, for example, Mel from Stroud says:
“i am mildly psychic and i snese this boy was evacualted from the war,his father died,his mother died of old age,he lives with an old couple and this used to be his school,hopes this helps everyone”
(To be honest, I don’t think for a minute that the journalists at either paper actually believed that the photo was real, and they probably did instantly work out where it came from. But The Sun’s purpose is to entertain as much as it is to inform – so they wrote it up in all innocent seriousness, knowing that readers with a clue would be in on the joke. And that some readers would fall for it.)
(Via Macenstein, Know Your Mobile, Tabloid Watch, and half the rest of the internet.)
One of the greatest things about App Store games is that they’ve broken the seemingly relentless escalation of costs for developers and price-increases for end users. In a sense, many of the games on the store return us to the halcyon days of 8-bit games—playable, quickfire efforts that innovated and packed in plenty of personality.
Over at creature24.com, three guys are about to take this idea to the extreme, taking a skeleton idea for an iPhone game through to App Store submission—all in just 24 hours. Progress will be shown live on the website on March 6, starting at 9:00am EST, and the trio of devs say comments from visitors might even be integrated into the game. I caught up with one of the three crazy game creators, Binary Hammer‘s Bob Koon, to find out more.